Does VCS X8 support H.264 High Profile in a traversal zone

[Steve Deslandes]

I have a customer who is using a Polycom Group 500 to make a call to a Polycom HDX. The call is routed from the Group 500 thru a VCS Control - VCS Expressway - VCS Expressway - Polycom HDX. When the call connects, the far end receives no video, only audio. One thing I noticed is that when the call connects, the transmit and received codec's are different. I will see H.264 HP as the transmit, but H.264 as the receive. The result seems to be that no video is received at the far end. Only Audio works. The VCS control is at version x8.5.1 at the 2 VCS expressway are at version x8.7. Has anyone seem such behaviour? If we change the settings on the Polycom to do BASIC MODE and force it to H.261, everything works. Is it possible that the VCS doesn't support media tunneling properly when running H.264 High Profile? When the call is direct without going thru the VCS infrastructure, everything works fine.

[altonomus]

I am having a similar issue with all Cisco products.  EX90 registered to CUCM dialing toward a cloud VC system.  In our scenario there is no video media at all (send or receive) and there is an audio channel. The cloud provider is pointing to making sure we can use H.264.  Expressway-C & E are 8.6.  

[Patrick Sparkman]

Looks like you're both running into bug CSCuy95177, and there is not current fix for it.  However, you might be able to downgrade to VCS X8.6.1 as the bug notes mention that the issue is seen after upgrading from it to X8.7, although it's probably no guarantee that it will work as one says he's currently running X8.6.

[Steve Deslandes]

Thank you Patrick. As usual, I think you hit it directly on the nose. Do you know of any issues I might run into by doing this downgrade?

We actually went from X8.5.1 to X8.7 because we had an issue with our VCS's rebooting on their own with an "application failed" alarm (An unexpected software error was detected in python[16336]: unknown reason). Do you know if this bug is fixed on version X8.6.1?

[Patrick Sparkman]

Be sure to review the VCS release notes to see if any features or resolved bugs that X8.7 introduced that might affect you if you downgrade.

There is no bug that mentions the python[16336] error, so there is no telling if you'll come across this or not if you downgrade.  If you do get this error again, suggest you contact TAC so they can look into it.